The Last Enemy
by Mystic25
Summary: SPOILERS FROM DEATHLY HALLOWS HP 7. A small revision to the grave scene at Godric’s Hollow. HHr hinting, don’t read if it bothers you. Sorry to the first reviwer, I found a lot of errors, and had to repost.


"The Last Enemy"

AUTHOR: Mystic25

Summary: SPOILERS FROM DEATHLY HALLOWS (HP 7). A small revision to the grave scene at Godric's Hollow. H/Hr hinting, don't read if it bothers you.

PAIRING: H/Hr backdrop.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all characters associated are the property of J.K Rowling, no money is being made off of this. I own nothing worth claiming in a lawsuit settlement.

A/N: This is my first time writing for this fandom. I am a cemented veteran author of Dark Angel fics, but I just read the last HP book and decided to dabble in this area.

A/N: #2: This story hints at H/Hr. I know how that really stands in the realm of the stories, but this is a fandom, my fandom to be specific, and I didn't tie you down and make you read it, so please don't lecture me about that or how "it will never be." this is a world of AU fiction here okay?

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_The last enemy that shall be defeated is death._

The snow that fell around the engravings of these words almost obscured them behind their flakes of indifferent whiteness. But the snowflakes attempts to cover up the words on the marble was futile. The pair of green eyes – burning with a passion for reading as a drowning man was for air – soaked them in.

Harry's eyes still traveled over the words long after he had deciphered their meaning, long after the words themselves had been permanently etched into his brain. The coat of the old Muggle man who's identity he had stolen was wrapped around him tightly, but the bitter cold still broke into his body, pouring like an unwanted liquid into his veins.

But Harry was indifferent to the physicality of this bitter numbness; feeling the cold as only something different to the gripping, burning numbness that was locking a death grip on his chest, threatening to cut off his air.

"That's a Death Eater saying-" Harry's chest heaved on a emotion that he choked down before it could reveal itself as anything other then a hard, heavy intake of air. "Why is that there?" His voice had gone higher at the end, but he forced himself to retain control, wanting an answer.

Hermione remained silent beside him, at first like she didn't know the answer, or that she didn't care to respond. But Harry knew her too well – even now, looking out from the eyes of an unfamiliar Muggle woman – he knew she would tell him something.

In those short few seconds Harry knew Hermione's brain to be analyzing, trying to find a right response to his remark, the nameless emotion inside him transformed itself into anger and errputed on the only other living thing besides himself inside the graveyard.

"What does it mean?" Harry's voice was low, he hadn't shouted, but it had contained a force that had made the quietness of the tone reverberate around the clearing of soundless witnesses.

Hermione raised her false Muggle eyes up to Harry's "It doesn't mean what you think it does," Her voice sounded close to tears, but none escaped her eyes. "It's not just a Death Eater saying Harry, it means – living beyond death." Her voice dropped low, a sound barely audible enough to hear, letting the wind carry it away into the cold night.

Harry's eyes glinted, and Hermione could see sad anger behind them; and she found herself stammering into another meaning to try and quell what was lurking in Harry's gaze:

"It mean's being alive again-" Hermione hated the puniness of her statement. It was like a kitten trying to tear apart a dragon, meaningless. "Alive in everything-"

"In everything except what counts," Harry's voice had interrupted her and he cast her a look that was colder then the wind that whipped through their clothes and hair. The iciness of his gaze was not lost on Hermione, and he saw her shrink under it.

He wasn't mad at her, he wasn't mad at anything. It was pain that he felt, an unyielding, relentless, pain that had threatened to drop him the moment he laid his eyes on his parent's grave. But seeing their names – names of those he wanted to know as more then just memories – had made him too weak too explain the reality to Hermione.

He breathed in deeply, wanting in desperation to catch just a hint of anything that had been his parents. But his nose only filled with the harsh, stinging wind that carried with it an underlying smell of decay.

Still Harry tried again, forgetting that he was 17 – a grown man – forgetting all that he had grown up to be, all that he had seen, done, and endured, trying to find an essence of his parents in the air, any tiny atom of life that might have escaped their grave. But the air filled his lungs only halfway before a heavy, bone-crushing realization shattered into him, and he knew he wouldn't find anything.

"It should have been me," Harry's words were said on the exhale of his breath, a whisper that didn't echo.

The sadness of what he had just admitted seized him with such a terrifying loneliness that he forgot that anyone else was standing there until he felt a smaller hand slide into his.

"Harry no," Hermione turned fully to him, the intensity of her gaze, melting through his conjured disguise, seeing only him standing before her, broken, lost. "No it shouldn't have been."

Hermione's words snapped at the thin amount of restraint Harry had been trying to hold onto ever since he entered Godric's Hollow. "They didn't have to die for me." Tears were now slowly falling down his face, the bitter cold wind freezing them to his skin almost instantly.

"It's what you do for someone you love," Hermione told him. She reached up a hand to Harry's face to try and chip away some of the tear tracks frozen there. "They loved you Harry – they would have never let it been you." Her efforts to remove the tiny ice particles off of Harry's face were futile, but in the end more tears that flowed hotly down his cheeks melted them away.

Harry turned away from Hermionie, and stared back down at the single headstone, where the remains of James and Lily Potter lay, sleeping, and indifferent to the fact that their living son stood so close to them; so near and alive, but wishing for nothing more then at that moment to be sleeping under the snow with them, to be a family again.

Harry realized in that moment that he had nothing to give to them; he hadn't even thought about it; and with that realization came an overwhelming guilt. All the plants in the cemetery were coated in shells of frozen ice or lying dormant underground, waiting. He turned back up to Hermione, like he had done so many times when they were kids.

Hermione's heart nearly broke at the look she saw on Harry's face. It was a child's loss, coupled with a man's guilt, a guilt that darkened a scar on his body even more prominent then his famous lightning one. She didn't verbally ask Harry what it was he wanted, after all these years, after all this time, she knew. She raised her want into the night sky and swept it across the blackness; and an eruption of red Christmas Roses emitted from its tip, falling through the air like a gentle rain.

Harry caught all of them, forming them into a bouquet in his arms, and then slowly, slowly, he knelt next to his parent's grave and laid the flowers down onto the snow where they stood out brightly against the backdrop of white.

"I'm sorry mum and dad." More tears fell from Harry's eyes, splashing silently onto the petals of the roses. "I'm so sorry." Only the silence greeted him, and the realization tore through him then that they would never know him, that his mother would never hold him the way Ron's mother did.

A sob broke free from Harry's mouth, quiet, but hauntingly sad because of it, only echoing around the place it had cried out for.

He felt the quiet weight of something against his back, and felt the warmth of a hand there.

Hermione was on her knees beside him, rubbing his back in slow circles. Harry turned up to her at that contact; he knew she was still under the disguise of the Muggle woman. The feeling of her hands on his back were familiar, but physically different then Hermione's, older, frailer. But when he looked into her face, he didn't see the Muggle woman. He saw her long, thick brown hair dotted with flakes of snow, her pale skin pink from cold, her intelligent brown eyes, now red from tears she had been silently shedding.

She had been crying for him – for his pain, his loss. And it was this that finally crumbled the last strains of the frail resolve he had been holding onto ever since he had come here. His body began to convulse on sobs that he had forced down after the first one had been emitted – for fear that he would cry forever with a grief that threatened to crush him.

Images – memories he wasn't even sure were real - raced across his mind. The laughter of his father as he amused his tiny son with levitating objects above his crib, the warmth of his mother's smile right before she kissed him goodnight.

Harry jumped at the feeling of the gentle warmth of a kiss against his skin – believing for one insane instant that it had come from his mother. But as the figure pulled back, it was Hermione's features – not Lily's – that came into view. Her eyes were sad as she rubbed her thumb over the spot on his forehead where she had just kissed him.

Harry sighed painfully and blinked away the tears that were clouding his vision. He felt the coldness of her skin as he kissed her in the same place.

Hermione closed her eyes at the contact, feeling the rawness that his gesture emulated. And she wanted desperately to end an ache she knew would never be soothed. To awaken the pair that were asleep under the blanket of snow – even if just for a moment – to show them just how much their son missed them.

Harry pressed his forehead against hers and she could feel the wetness of his warm tears on her cold skin. His sobs grew quieter – but became infinitely sadder as he felt her return his contact – drifting upwards through the ebony blackness, up to the souls of those who wept with him behind the silence of the stars.

The living pair inside the cemetery remained there for countless minutes – never moving any closer, but never once breaking the contact they had. They were no longer Harry Potter and Hermione Granger, no longer a man and a woman – but two human souls who were alive in the aftermath of devastating loss.

Harry had no idea how long then had been there; but he couldn't stand the sight of the graveyard anymore; he wanted to leave. He pulled away from Hermione and stood up, feeling her eyes on him the entire time. He offered her a hand, and after she placed hers into his, he pulled her silently to her feet.

The snow all around the grave was indented with the prints their bodies had left in it – only the headstone remained unchanged from their visit – it's polished marble gleaming off a light that didn't seem to exist in nature, but existed here.

Harry bent low over the headstone and caressed it. And he finally felt the fragment of an essence that was James and Lily Potter – in the engravings of their names under his fingertips. It traveled up his arm like a warm caress, relishing in the contact of the one it had waited so long for; the essence inside linked to the souls that wanted so badly to touch him for real.

Harry let this warmth reach his brain, locking away the memory, not wanting to forget what it felt like to touch a part of them again. He felt Hermione move closer to him. He slipped an arm across her shoulder and squeezed her – not for physical warmth; death was an enemy that had taken so much from him already; he wanted the warmth of something truly alive inside this lonely place.

Hermione slipped her arm around his waist, and her head found it's way down to his chest where the beating of his frantic heart echoed in her ear.

They turned in this embrace and walked back through the graveyard to the out of sight Kissing Gate.

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Let me address what I'm sure will be some of the main critiques:

I know the movies and the books are two different animals, but this is a scene I would like to see in both.

I _know _that Hermione will end up with Ron, I've read all the books, and I _know_ Harry is with Ginny.

Now that we've established that…

The entire scene at Godric's Hollow struck me, it was very moving, and I wanted to add a bit more to it. Not to take away from Jo Rowling, her writing is brilliant, I just had an itch.

This wasn't supposed to be a profession of love from Harry and Hermione (again I know, not happening, blah blah…fandom ship remember? Blame Dan Radcliffe and Emma Watson, they ruined me for Hermione and Ron.) It was supposed to be about the emulating sadness they found themselves in at the cemetery, basically it was about feeling.

Please review.

Peace,

Mystic


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